Al Jazeera: Out-Foxing Fox

If President Bush wants to rescue his Iraqi adventure, here's a suggestion:
Spend less time with C.I.A. sycophants like George Tenet and more time watching
Al Jazeera television.

The Bush administration's central intelligence
failure was not that it failed to tap enough telephones. Rather, it didn't
bother to understand the mind-set in Iraq or the larger Arab world  and
it still doesn't.

The transfer of sovereignty is a useful moment to
look back at what went so wrong in Iraq. As I see it, the root problem was
hubris born in a Washington echo chamber, and a resulting conviction that Iraqis
would welcome us with flowers.

When I visited Iraq in the run-up to the
war, I met another foreigner by the pool of the Rasheed Hotel, where we hoped
our conversation couldn't be bugged, and we spoke of our bafflement. Senior
U.S. officials seemed genuinely convinced that our invading troops would be
hailed as heroes, while ordinary Iraqis often talked about fighting U.S. troops
with guns, grenades and suicide bombs. Iraqis typically hated Saddam, but also
hated the idea of an invasion.

But the neocons refused to hear it. From
their Washington and New York cocoons, they insisted that ordinary Iraqis
welcomed an invasion. Ahmad Chalabi had told them so. Or they read it in The
Weekly Standard.

They even mangled the country's name  Mr. Bush
called it Eye-rack  yet they bet American lives that all would go well.
That's "the arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright termed it when
Democrats made similar blunders in Vietnam. (An excerpt is at www.nytimes.com
/kristofresponds, Posting 505.)

Such arrogance has a long and sad
lineage. The Wolfowitz of World War I was Sir Douglas Haig, the British
commander who launched an offensive that cost the British 420,000 casualties.
"It naturally pleased Haig to have carefully chosen and nicely cooked little
tidbits of `intelligence' about broken German divisions, heavy German casualties
and diminishing German morale served up to him every day and all day," Prime
Minister David Lloyd George wrote. "He beamed satisfaction and confidence. His
great plan was prospering. The whole atmosphere of this secluded little
community reeked of that sycophantic optimism."

Sound familiar?

"We know that Al Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over
and over again," Don Rumsfeld complained during the war. "What they do is, when
there's a bomb that goes down, they grab some children and some women and
pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children. . . . We are dealing
with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further
their case  and to the extent people lie, ultimately they are caught
lying and they lose their credibility."

Good point.

The gulf
between the American and Arab realities is the subject of "Control Room," a
powerful documentary by Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American. She looks at Al
Jazeera's coverage of the war, offering a sobering reminder that there are
multiple ways of perceiving the same events.

President Bush's narrative
for the war was: "Altruistic Americans risk their lives to topple evil dictator
and establish democracy and human rights." The Arab narrative was: "The same
Yankees who pay for Israelis to blow up Palestinians are now seizing Iraqi oil
fields and maiming Iraqi women and children."

I'm not a big fan of Al
Jazeera, which tends to be emotional and nationalistic. As U.S. Lt. Josh
Rushing astutely notes in "Control Room," Al Jazeera is the Arab version of the
Fox News Channel: "It benefits Al Jazeera to play to Arab nationalism because
that's their audience, just like Fox plays to American patriotism, for the exact
same reason  American nationalism  because that's their
demographic audience and that's what they want to see."

If the Arab
world is going to break out of its self-pitying self-absorption, it's going to
have to understand American attitudes  and it could do worse than
switching its televisions from Al Jazeera to Fox. And if the Bush
administration is going to turn Iraq around and engage the Arab world
effectively, then it must try harder to escape the echo chamber and understand
the Arabs  and it could do worse than switching from the reassuring
euphony of Fox to Al Jazeera.

Mr. Bush might even pledge that from now
on, he won't invade a country before learning how to pronounce its
name.